(N)either Latvian (n)or Russian: Can Russian Speakers Find a Legitimate Place in the Discourses of the Latvian Nation-State? (original) (raw)
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Based on media discourse analysis, this article addresses the construction of Russian-speaking identity in Latvia from a discourse-theoretical approach. Through a focus on the discursive elements of identity formation it will be argued that public projections of Russian-speaking identity are both a counter-reaction to, and a synthesis with, constructed ‘Latvian’, ‘Russian’ and ‘European’ identities and discourses. It will be shown that although Latvia's Russian-speaking identity is often constructed negatively, in opposition to the Latvian state and the Latvian ‘Other’, it is now increasingly premised upon an acceptance of various Latvian narratives and discourses which are enabling the emergence of a more positive Latvian–Russian identity.
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Recent research on the acculturation strategies of Russian speakers in Latvia has demonstrated that there is a high level of support for integration (identifying with both Latvian and Russian cultures) compared to marginalization, separation, or assimilation. However, a number of researchers have also highlighted the negative impact of top-down narratives and discourses produced by the country's politicians and journalists. These discourses, it is argued, hamper the integration process by creating incompatible identity positions between ‘Russian-speakers’ and ‘Latvians’. Accordingly, this research turns to focus group interviews with Russian speakers in Latvia in order to uncover the nuances of their identity-forming processes, their relations with the respective Russian and Latvian states, and their acculturation strategies, which are commonly overlooked in top-down accounts. Based on the analysis of the qualitative data it will be argued that there is great potential for an integrated, yet culturally distinct Latvian-Russian identity in Latvia.
Journal für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa (JKGE) / Journal for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe, 2024
This paper is a call for a methodological expansion in studies of the Russian-speaking community in the former Soviet spaces and beyond. The article critically reflects on the dominant quantitative approaches to studying Russian-speaking identities in Latvia and emphasises the need to engage with more qualitative and refined methods – those that allow space for agency in respondents’ self-identification. A growing concern about the Russian-speaking minority in the Baltic states, increases the need for academic and public explorations of the sense of ‘self’ and belonging amongst the local Russophone community. Despite a growing number of studies that point to conceiving representatives of the Russophone community as complex and heterogeneous, the public polling system and the political elite discourse are failing to account for multiplicity and situatedness of self-iden- tification, tending to reconstruct an ethnicised and homogenised identity of local Russian speakers as lagging in progressive European values, as benighted, as a ‘grey zone’ of indifference. The author uses this tension between the complex self-making of Russian speakers and their essentialist reconstruction through the polling system and media as an entry point to invite social scientists working in the field to approach the ‘grey zones’ in East European studies not as monochrome, but as rich in meaning and encompassing ambiguity, thus offering new insights into the Russian speaking diaspora, empirically and/or analytically.
This project concentrates on language policy regarding ethnic minorities in contemporary Latvia and Ukraine. Language policy plays an extremely important role in the system of Eastern European nationalisms because it is supposed to be one of the markers for defining the boundaries of a nation-state and reproducing cultural identity of the political community. After the Soviet Union disintegration in 1991 Latvia and Ukraine enhanced a unique historic chance to conduct the politics of nationalizing states in terms of Rogers Brubaker’s theory of nationalism that caused the outrage of the Russian-speaking population, other ethnic minorities and cultural groups and led to continuous public debates in mass media. This paper is a multi-sided research project that includes the historical context of the formation of the Latvian and Ukrainian nations, analysis of contemporary language policy in two European countries and discourse analysis of public debates in Russian-language newspapers in Latvia and Ukraine. The decision to choose Russian-language newspapers (daily or the ones issued several times a week) is based on the premise that these newspapers articulate the interests of minority groups and mediate between the majority of the population and minority groups, attracting attention of the general public to their problems. The social constructivist paradigm based on P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann’s «The Social Construction of Reality» is chosen as a broader theoretical framework. The constructivist approach to nations elaborated by B. Anderson, E. Gellner and R. Brubaker is also applied to the investigation of nation-building processes and their influence on language policy regarding ethnic minorities. While the issue of language policy is often aggravated in mass media and considered to be an urgent social problem, the theory of social problems construction developed by J. Kitsuse and M. Spector and the concept of language (vernacular) games elaborated by J. Kitsuse and P. Ibarra make a significant contribution to the empirical analysis of representation strategies of language policy in Russian-language newspapers in Ukraine and Latvia. The programme called ‘’sociology of knowledge approach’’ (SKAD) elaborated by German sociologist Reiner Keller is chosen as most relevant methodological tool that enables the researcher to draw attention to conflicting discourses that exist in the public space and social inequalities reflected in different narratives of language policy in Russian-language press in two countries. The main outcome of the research is that the issue of language policy regarding ethnic minorities is constructed as a full-scale social problem by the means of different discursive strategies including rhetorical idioms, metaphors, and the mixture of claim-making styles that were distinguished in the course of analysis. It means that contemporary nationalization movements in Latvia and Ukraine are deeply intertwined with the ongoing, flexible and debatable process of constructing political boundaries based on cultural characteristics such as language, common history and education. It is worth noting that despite the general Soviet context of national and language policy in both countries, there is a remarkable difference in the strategies of representation of language policy in Ukrainian and Latvian public space. Key words: language policies, ethnic minorities, discourse of Russian-language press, social problems, nationalism.
HOW TO BE MANY: UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENCE AND DISAGREEMENT AMONG YOUNG RUSSIAN SPEAKERS IN LATVIA
University of Bristol, 2023
This reflexive ethnographic study aims to contribute to the knowledge about minoritised young Russian speakers in Latvia by understanding how a group of young Russophone high-school students (aged 16-18) perceive and perform difference in the context of long-lasting exclusionary minority politics in the country. By applying the theoretical lens of Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism, the study was able to foreground moments of disagreement and conflict – as opposed to the conventional focus on the moments of consolidation and unity – with ‘the other’. The methodological approach to extend school ethnography to an urban walking experiment allowed to account for Mouffe’s emerging and nomadic conception of identity as well as to observe the group’s engagement with ‘the different’ in a less confined setting. The study contributes to the pool of previous research in this field by unpacking the complexity behind the relations of the research participants with ‘self’ and ‘the other’. The process of perceiving and performing difference by these young people can be described as a balancing act of two contradictory yet complementary behaviours: 1) displacement across various discursive fields in the process of self-making, and 2) fixation – when the research participants perform their difference according to the context and structures of power in place. By being able to navigate complex structures of power, social norms and expectations ‘on the surface’, these young people thus negotiate a ‘backstage’ space where they can be many, i.e., enact multiple, at times conflicting discursive fields in the process of self-making. By depicting the research participants as constituted through multiple subject positions, the study contributes to the critique of the binary conception of Latvian society along ethnic lines, as well as to more global issues of democratising minority/majority relations in post-Soviet/post-colonial contexts.
The Russian Review, Vol. 79 (3), p. 522-524, 2020
Ksenia Maksimovtsova focuses on the processes of constructing language policy as an urgent social problem in the Russian-language blogs and news websites in post-Soviet Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine, whereas Ukraine is put in the first place in the order of analysis, and it is allocated the most space in the book. The three countries inherited “asymmetric bilingualism” from the Soviet Union, that is, the dominance of Russian in all areas of social life, and, consequently, the task of promoting the “titular languages” (Estonian, Latvian, and Ukrainian) became the primary concern for their authorities.